Jane Austen turns 250 more alive than ever
- GutBer English
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Dear reader, we're celebrating! It's a truth universally acknowledged that today marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen, the immortal author of works such as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, among others. Across the United Kingdom, the cities where Miss Austen spent part of her short life (Bath and Winchester, for example) have dedicated all of 2025 to organizing events in her honour, and we've had the opportunity to attend some of them.
To celebrate the occasion, Jane Austen's house in Chawton has organized a series of events, as can be seen on its website. In our beloved Bath, where Jane spent several seasons, they also didn't want to miss the opportunity, organizing a festival that extended throughout the year, as well as decorating its streets with motifs related to Jane Austen's works and holding balls where attendees came in period costume, filling the streets of the beautiful city with colour and transporting us to a different time. Winchester Cathedral has also held various events to honour the writer.
Several theatrical productions have also been made to acknowledge the writer, some recreating specific works such as Emma at the Theatre Royal Bath and others about her life and times, such as Austentacious in the West End.
But what do we know about Jane Austen?
We know that she was born on this day, December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, and that she died on July 18, at the age of 41, in the neighbouring city of Winchester, the former capital of England, where the author is buried. We were able to visit her grave last summer when we visited the city.
The daughter of an Anglican minister, the Reverend George Austen, head of the poor branch of the family in a society where the firstborn son inherited, and Cassandra Leigh, also from a wealthy family, but without inheritance as a woman, Jane recounts in her novels how this reality affects her life and that of the women around her. Raised in a loving and nurturing environment, Jane received an education where theatricality and creativity were essential. Despite having had suitors, neither Jane nor her sister Cassandra ever married, which could have meant an improvement in their economic conditions, and the ways in which women around them achieved that stability are the focus of many of the stories she tells in her novels. Given the family's financial difficulties, they had to move on several occasions, residing for periods in places like Bath and Southampton, until, thanks to the generosity of her brother Edward, they settled permanently in Chawton, near Winchester.
Jane wrote from a young age, but didn't manage to publish her novels until she was 36, 5 years old before her death. She did so anonymously ("by a lady") since it was not expected of a woman to be a writer and thus protect her reputation in her environment. The first to be published was Sense and Sensibility in 1811 and like all the others, except Pride and Prejudice, it was published at her own risk, that is, the publisher advanced the cost and recovered it through sales. If these were not sufficient, the author would have to pay the difference. Otherwise, she received only 10% of the sales.
In early 1916, Jane's health began to deteriorate rapidly, likely due to lymphoma. Her family took her to Winchester for treatment, but she died in the city on July 18, 1817, and was buried in the cathedral. Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published after her death. Her flair for dialogue, humour, and irony, as well as her reconstruction of the conditions under which women of her time and their social environment had to seek solutions and decent means of subsistence within the context of the nascent genre of the romantic novel, immortalized her work and her characters.
A good way to learn more about Jane's life is through the novel Miss Austen by Gill Hornby, recently adapted for television in a four-episode miniseries available on Movistar+, where through the letters found by her older sister, Cassandra, we discover the writer's supposed secrets.
Although Jane Austen ended her life in precarious financial conditions and received only a small salary for her literary work, which is why it's surprising that she was buried in Winchester Cathedral, over time she has generated a multi-million-dollar industry around her work. She was one of the first female writers to be introduced into the English literary canon and marked a new way of depicting women in novels, with her realistic expectations and their true situations in the society of her time, although, of course, limited to the social strata Austen herself knew. Like a moving snapshot of the times in which she lived, Jane Austen's works are full of humour and satire of her own time and her peers, and her timeless characters continue to inhabit the imaginations of new creators, as we see in the novels and films of Bridget Jones, where a modern Mr Darcy reappears, played again by Colin Firth (as he did in the 1995 television version of Pride and Prejudice, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in September), or the aforementioned Miss Austen. Her works have been adapted numerous times for television, film, and theatre, and she continues to be a huge influence today.
Happy birthday, Miss Austen!
List of works
Novels
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Mansfield Park (1814)
Emma (1816)
Northanger Abbey (1818, posthumous)
Persuasion (1818, posthumous)
Lady Susan (1871, posthumous)
Unfinished fiction
The Watsons (1804)
Sanditon (1817)
Other works
Sir Charles Grandison (adapted play) (1793, 1800)
Plan of a Novel (1815)
Poems (1796–1817)
Prayers (1796–1817)
Letters (1796–1817)
Juvenilia—Volume the First (1787–1793)
Frederic & Elfrida
Jack & Alice
Edgar & Emma
Henry and Eliza
The Adventures of Mr. Harley
Sir William Mountague
Memoirs of Mr. Clifford
The Beautifull Cassandra [sic]
Amelia Webster
The Visit
The Mystery
The Three Sisters
A Fragment
A beautiful description
The generous Curate
Ode to Pity
Juvenilia—Volume the Second (1787–1793)
Love and Freindship
Lesley Castle
The History of England
A Collection of Letters
The female philosopher
The first Act of a Comedy
A Letter from a Young Lady
A Tour through Wales
A Tale
Juvenilia—Volume the Third (1787–1793)
Evelyn
Catharine, or The Bowe
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